Computer users are requiring an ever-increasing amount of electronic storage space. Home computer users' increased storage of multimedia data, especially video and photographic data, has only served to increase the amount of storage space needed. Likewise, industry also requires increased storage space. As more and more business is being conducted electronically, there has been an ever-increasing demand and need for the storage of this vast amount of business data. As a result, there has been a demand to manage the storage lifetime of data in an attempt to decrease the amount of electronic data kept for an indefinite period.
Currently, the majority of this electronic data is stored on magnetic hard disk drive devices. A disk drive is a device implementing disk storage in which data is digitally recorded by various electronic magnetic optical or mechanical methods on disks (also referred to as the media). Disk storage is used in both computer storage and consumer electronic storage (e.g., audio CDs and video disks, standard DVD and Blu-Ray). To that end, disk drives may implement such disk storage with fixed or removable media. Notable types of disk drives are the hard disk drive (HDD) containing a nonremovable disk, the floppy disk drive (FDD) and its removable floppy disk, and various optical disk drives and associated optical disk media.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information efficiently and with less overhead. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
An information handling system may implement a storage controller (also referred to as a storage array or, more generally, a data handling system). The storage controller may have an operating system that presents a logical view of the storage system to a user, and a physical layer manager that manages the actual physical storage devices. The storage controller may manage the location of blocks of data across multiple physical storage devices. With traditional storage management, a logical unit number (LUN) or virtual disk is created and assigned to each application server or user—a process called “provisioning.”
An LUN or “Logical Unit Number” is an identifier assigned to a “logical disk.” A logical disk can be located on one or more physical storage devices. A logical disk can be further partitioned, to provide logical volumes, virtual disks and other “chunks” of data storage.
Creating a LUN (similar in principle to creating a partition on a computer's hard drive) carves out some portion of empty physical space in a storage array, which is then formally assigned to the particular application or user. Over time, the user or application gradually fills the storage space allocated for the LUN and another LUN can be used.
The present disclosure relates generally to storage arrays and more particularly to techniques for provisioning, managing, and deleting LUNs on physical storage devices containing multiple disk drives and in storage area networks (SAN) where time-life management of data is needed.